I’ve often wondered what are the best business apps? Often, I’m dazzled with a ton of options to choose from – with every app promising to improve my productivity. So, I decided to test a few that were talked about most. It makes sense, as a small business owner, to always be looking for a way to improve our work efficiency. Sure enough, I was able to find a ton of apps that were great for starting your own business.
That is why I have carefully compiled this list of apps for starting your own business.
SurveyMonkey
Stop guessing what your customers want, and ask them yourself. With SurveyMonkey, you can create surveys to measure user engagement and get anonymous customer feedback on your products, pricing, website, and any unmet needs of your target market. Build simple or more complex surveys, and find tips on the SurveyMonkey website about question types and how to word them. Survey creation is collaborative, and results and reports can be viewed by different team members without sharing login information.
Key Features:
- Create surveys from a template and brand with your own business colors and logos
- Review survey results as they come in from any device
- Send your surveys out into the world via your website, email, social media accounts, and more
Price: Freemium, with advanced packages starting at $32 per month (there are discounts for students and educators)
FreshBooks
This cloud accounting software will make your invoicing (and more!) quick and simple. With FreshBooks, you can create and personalize invoices, and set up automatic billing. You can also track business expenses — and create a minute-by-minute record of how you spend your time for a real eye-opening accounting of your productivity.
Key Features:
- Accessible from any and all of your screens
- Accept credit cards on your mobile device
- Converts estimates into invoices
Price: $15/month for five clients; Free Invoice Template downloads
Breather
As a startup, you can only take so many meetings in a coffee shop or in a client’s office.
It’s much nicer to do business in a space that you can call yours when you are trying to win over a new client or just relax and get some work done between meetings.
Breather is the app to let you do this. They offer Airbnb-style listings of a variety of spaces that you can rent by the hour in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Ottawa, and Montreal.
The app helps you find a meeting space on the fly and lets you choose a place based specifically on your needs, giving you filters for the available spaces by meeting time, the amount of seating available, and a variety of site-specific features.
Starting at only $15 an hour, and with a host of beautiful spaces that will blow the traditional conference room out of the water, Breather is a must-have for the founder who finds themselves frequently on the road.
Available on iPhone and Android.
Google Apps for Business
Google Apps for Business is one of the most powerful collections of tools for any business, and with plans starting at only $5 per user per month — it’s one entrepreneurs can’t afford to go without! Google Apps allows you to centralize your team’s communication and integrates email, storage, calendars, video meetings, forms, and more into a single hub. Plus, there are dozens of great plugins to make Gmail even more powerful. (A few of my favorites are listed here.)
Beckon
Clear communication is integral for any new startup that wants to get their ideas through to anyone who is willing to listen. It’s even more important if you have some international connections. That’s where Beckon can help out.
It’s a new app that allows for free calling and messaging that is also extremely clear and stable. It works across the globe or right down the street.
While it’s completely free to make calls to other Beckon users no matter where they are, in some cases it’s still free to call users not using the app when using the BeckonOut plugin.
Beckon even allows for big 100+ person conference calls, so you can collaborate with everyone you’re working with at the same time.
Available on iPhone and Android.
Basecamp
Basecamp is an online project management tool that allows teams to collaborate on jobs of all kinds. Basecamp is the single most important tool we have at ZinePak. It keeps everyone organized and on schedule with intuitive and powerful calendars, to-do lists, and discussion boards. The company offers a 60-day free trial. I’ve personally suggested Basecamp to more than a dozen of my entrepreneur friends, and every one of them has loved it. No matter what your business is, Basecamp helps you be better at it. Plans start at $20 per month (for unlimited users) after the trial period.
EchoSign
Contracts are critical to the success of every startup, because one misunderstood point or miscommunicated detail can potentially make or break your business. EchoSign is a great tool for quickly and easily capturing legally-binding signatures on contracts, purchase orders, and more. Customers can sign documents from their computers, phones, or tablets. With an enterprise-level tool that’s this simple to use, there is no excuse for a startup skipping the critical step of having clients sign on the dotted line. Prices start at $15 per month.
MailChimp
Fifteen years ago, companies spent millions of dollars building enterprise-level email systems to communicate with their customers. Now, entrepreneurs can choose between literally dozens of free and low-cost options. For ZinePak, MailChimp has been the best option. It’s packed with powerful analytics to help you reach customers at the right time and in the right way. And, with hundreds of beautifully-designed templates, it takes mere minutes to design and send your first campaign. If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers in your database, MailChimp is free to use. Score!
Edgar
Edgar is a social media scheduling tool (like Buffer or SproutSocial) that helps your posts and updates work harder. Edgar is the only social tool designed to help you create evergreen posts that are automatically re-shared strategically over time. The more you use Edgar, the more powerful (and intuitive!) it becomes. The tool is currently in beta, but it’s changed the way our team thinks about social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
5Miles
You’re starting a new business, but don’t have a lot of money to spend, right? That’s an extremely common issue among entrepreneurs.
However you still need desks, tables, chairs, whiteboards, and more to get your work done. It’s an obvious yet underestimated cost startup CEOs tend to overlook, since they’re focusing on their ground-breaking ideas and hiring workers.
This is where the 5Miles App can help every new barebones operation. Using the GPS feature in your phone, the 5Miles app geo-locates where you are and shows what second hand stuff is on sale around you.
So any of the furniture or fixtures that you need for your new office (or garage-office), is only a few minutes away, and usually you can land quite a few deals.
On the other hand, if you need some quick seed money to get your startup running, it’s a very quick and simple way to sell unused things that are just sitting around.
The 5Mile app’s UI is heavily focused on images and is setup in a Pinterest fashion, making browsing and finding exactly what you’re looking for on your phone simple and intuitive.
Available on iPhone and Android.
Xero
Nobody (that isn’t an accountant) likes talking about managing their books, but it’s a necessary aspect in running a successful business.
Xero makes bookkeeping easy by offering a web-based system that’s inexpensive, easy to use, and has a number of different mobile options to give you the ability to manage the financial side of your business from anywhere.
Xero integrates a number of great features like invoicing and payroll in their middle tier plan ($30/month), and they even offer multi-currency support in their higher end $49/month plan, all while enabling access to an unlimited number of users.
When compared to larger competitors like Quickbooks, it gets just as much done at a rate that’s easier to manage.
Available on iPhone and Android.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) lets you port files among PCs, tablets, and smartphones. The standard package comes with 30 GB of online storage per user with options to upgrade to unlimited. And it allows you to create docs, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and more.
Key Features:
- Offers a popular set of intelligent business apps
- Stops the need to use different apps for basic business functions
- Provides professional and ad-free business email experience.
Price: Plans start as low as $6 per user per month.
Related: How to Sign up for G Suite in Your DreamHost Panel
ShipStation
If you sell and ship products online, you need a time-saving e-commerce solution to streamline your shipping. Cloud-based ShipStation is simple to use and allows you to process online orders, get order alerts, print shipping labels, track shipments, and more.
Key Features:
- Works with most e-commerce platforms, including WooCommerce and Shopify
- Streamline the order processing system to fit your business’s needs
- Create custom shipping labels that show off your brand
Price: Plans start at $9 per month
Conclusion
It’s been said that there’s an app for everything. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration but there are a bunch of apps that can help you out whenever you need it. In fact, some apps have been specially designed to help you launch your own business. From managing projects to generating leads and measuring sales — you name it — we’ve got them all in this list.